Avoiding the Crowd?
Human beings encounter examples of following the “crowd” every day. Examples range from buying that special toy that everyone wants this Christmas, to investing in a startup company that seems especially promising, and even to supporting one candidate over another in a political election. However, all examples have a commonality, and that is people tend […]
Twitter VS Weibo – The Two Microblogging Services that Divide Up the World
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/jul/15/weibo-twitter-china http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/things-twitter-can-learn-from-sina-weibo/ Users’ choices among internet services are heavily based on the close social network they exist in. It’s almost always more beneficial for users to use matching services with individuals around them. Cascade occurs when a small group of people gradually converts to one service. All people in a strongly connected social […]
A New Way to Search
From my point of view, I would consider Google and Facebook as equally dominating in their respective fields – Google is easily the most popular search engine and Facebook takes the cake for the most widely used social networking site. It makes sense that each is working to expand and improve, but I find it […]
Has Social Media Influenced the Presidential Election?
Thousands of presidential ballots are currently making their way in for the 2012 Presidential Election. For all of the voters out there, one question arises: how much has social media influenced one’s voting decision? Some argue that social media has amplified many events during this presidential race. The Second Presidential Debate alone generated 7.2 million […]
New Take on the Power Law: Hitting Jackpot off of Long Tails for Magazine Companies
http://paidcontent.org/2012/10/31/the-very-long-tail-how-magazines-could-make-their-archives-sing/ The author, Robert Andrews, offers an interesting business model that some magazine companies are currently pursuing: publishers are making their decades-old content available to digital subscribers. Andrews points out that this change of business model may take advantage of the “long tail” of obscure products in the popularity curve that can drive the bulk […]
Rethinking Pagerank
http://news.yahoo.com/search-engine-launches-pagerank-killer-070816151.html Yahoo! has recently came up with a new way to generate result for search engines. This website is called “The Link Neighborhood”. Instead of the traditional pagerank method which involves a lot of calculations, this new system works by going back to the very basic concept of the online networks- categorizing webpages into groups […]
College Endowments: How the Rich get Richer
In spite of the current recession, college fundraising has increased by 8%. This number is slightly deceptive because 86% of the total endowment money went to just the top 25 schools. Only 1% of the money went to the bottom 25 schools. Such a drastic inequality in endowment money adheres to the “rich get richer, […]
Kick Starting an Idea.
When a certain technology has control over a market, it can be hard for new technologies to sneak in and find their own niche. It has been shown though that by one or two nodes in a network trying out this new thing, many others can slowly be converted as they find that the advantage […]
Crawling a spider’s web of data
In two decades the internet has grown from a small collection of academic hubs communicating with each other through hyperlinks to a full blown entity that has permeated every part of our lives and is now considered an integral tool for not only information retrieval but also for entertainment and social networking. Billions of web […]
Are Network Effects Overhyped?
Network effects. They are the sources of hope and ambition of online businesses and retailers. They have been deemed to be the catalysts behind the success of massive online-based companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Craigslist. The term that was mostly unknown a decade ago has been used (and is still being used) by many […]
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